Log in/Register

Please log in or register to continue. Registration is free and requires only your email address.

Log in

Register

Emailrequired

PasswordrequiredRemember me?

Please enter your email address and click on the reset-password button. You'll receive an email shortly with a link to create a new password. If you have trouble finding this email, please check your spam folder.

Valerie Jarrett is a beautiful and elegant woman with fine bone structure similar to Helena Bonham Carter in Planet of the Apes. No doubt, Roseanne was trying to say something disparaging- but she is an artist and so the joke is that her gibe misfired.

The Muslim Brotherhood was properly elected to power in Egypt. We didn't try to topple them. Barr would have needed to say ISIS or Al Qaeeda to drive her point- which is that Obama was anti-Israel- home.

Barr was sacked because she is mentally unstable and might cost the Studio a lot of money. Charlie Sheen was sacked for the same reason. Both are very very good at what they do. So is Mel Gibson but Gibson probably isn't off his head on booze or pills when making his films. So he gets a pass. It would be a different matter if there were an allegation of sexual impropriety. In that case, when watching a film we would become concerned that young people appearing on screen may have had to endure vile conduct simply so as to do the jobs they were trained to do. It would be a 'turn off' and this would affect the revenue the Studio or the Distributor could make.

Turning to Trump, the question we should ask is 'do his tweets affect his ability to perform the economic function for which he garnered votes?' Currently, the answer is yes. He has delivered on tax cuts. It also looks as though he has forestalled the American foreign policy establishment's penchant for doing, what Obama called, 'stupid shit' by the cheapest means possible- viz. twittering like a lunatic. This is a good thing. The Korean peninsula is safer now than it was. The Middle East is slightly more predictable. Europe has resiled from moral crusading and geopolitical adventurism.

Economics, as a source of public mischief, has been penned up by a man who actually made his own money and ran a sham educational institution of his own. It can't repeat its unctuous lies because those lies have the same ex falso quodlibet logical structure as Trump's tweets.

Trump, it seems, is delivering for his core constituency and doing so by the most economical means possible. He has shattered both the doctrinaire Libertarian as well as the ultra Evangelical wings of his party- a good thing, surely? Fox News too has lost salience. Whatever happened to Breitbart? Trump is driving back the forces of unreason by a lazier and more narcissistic version of the same thing. He is leading by example- the only way to be the change you desire to see in the world is by eating cheeseburgers in bed with a TV remote in one hand and an iphone in the other. Baudrillard never envisioned the White House itself becoming the bastion of the only sort of resistance we can put up to 'Virtual Reality'.

Why have 'wag the dog' wars in far off places which last too long? A simple tweet can satisfy the same urges. The truth is that the great and good only meet for the epistemic equivalent of golden showers. Simply as a matter of hygiene, its better for the free world if its leader eat cheeseburgers in bed in-between firing off farts and tweets.

I don't really have a dog in this fight. It's like debating the respective merits of the louse and the flea.

But I am again amazed at the way that Trump derangement syndrome has reduced a brilliant commentator to a shrill and shrewish partisan. How can Ian Buruma join in the farce that Samantha Bee was simply exercising her right to free speech?

Here are some responses.

1. Calling someone a "feckless c..." is not a substantive argument.

2. No, Bee was NOT attacking Ivanka Trump for her politics. Bee has no idea what Ivanka's views on immigration are. Ivanka's "offense" was not that she spoke up in support of her father's immigration policies. It was that she had the bloody nerve to post an Instagram photo of herself with her youngest baby, Theodore, on Memorial Day weekend. Infamous!

3. Of course, Bee was attacking Ivanka for her "bloodlines" -- specifically for being related to her father. By any standard, publicly humiliating and harassing a family member to get at Trump (or Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan) is a dirty business or, if you wish, not cricket.

4. Referring to Ivanka as a "public figure" may or may not be accurate after New York Times v Sullivan. But it is completely beside the point. As you yourself put it, this is not about what is LEGALLY permitted. It is about the "informal limits to free speech [that] are subject to norms of social respectability." Plainly Bee transgressed the limits of respectability -- so why can't you find words to say so?